Summer's Defining Moments

In the late hot Summer of 1962, a 10-year old boy noticed that his Father always had 3 things crowded in his shirt pocket when he went to work:

• a Parker fountain pen
• a pack of Salem cigarettes
• a pack of Beechnut peppermint gum; or
• a roll of wintergreen Lifesavers

On weekends, however, these items were replaced with a new invention, a pocket-sized transistor radio, which would inevitably be tuned to Detroit Tigers baseball games. The boy and his Father would park themselves on the dark screened-in porch and hear the young Ernie Harwell do the play-by-play. Unlike the Father's reaction to Ernie's crescendos, to the boy, Ernie's sometimes excited narrative of the Tigers exploits would always turn into a kind of purring which, when combined with the cicadas and occasional burps from the bullfrog in the nearby pond, would put the boy into a long doze. He never could match his Father's love for baseball. But the love he had for his Father was matchless.

That was the boy's defining moment for all his Summers rolled up into one, until the "last" Summer of 1964, when the adored Father was suddenly extracted from this life while the boy was off playing with friends on a Sunday afternoon.

One of the joys of youth is the feeling that bad times will end sooner or later, but good times will continue forever. We grow up and find to our dismay one day that bad times can last longer than they have a right to, and good times never last long enough.

The premier book on defining moments of a Summer long gone is of course Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, in which the exploits of 12-year old Douglas Spaulding in Green Town, Illinois, in the Summer of 1928 are chronicled with magical, eternal significance. In a Forward written many years after the book was first published in 1946, Bradbury admits that the story is mostly autobiographical. The Forward ends with these lines:

"The wine still waits in the cellars below.

My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.

The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied Summer.

Why and how?

Because I say it is so."

And so it is with my Summer of 1962. That Summer is only sleeping somewhere, its resurrection a certainty.

Thanks for blogging with me thus far.